Spy dramas like Black Doves and The Agency get personal

NEW YORK - Ukraine and Russia are at war. Political instability and civil war rage in Sudan. Iran is ramping up its nuclear capabilities. The world is basically a mess in The Agency, the new espionage series that inundates the viewer with rapidly intersecting storylines set on an increasingly complicated geopolitical playing field.

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The series, which premiered on Nov 29 on Paramount+ (with the Showtime tier), is part of a surge in spy shows that also includes The Day Of The Jackal on Peacock, Black Doves on Netflix, and Slow Horses, which wrapped up its fourth season on Apple TV+ in October.

True to the genre, these shows jet all over the globe (though mostly Europe) and unfold in high-tech command centers and dark urban alleyways, via thrilling shoot-outs and furtive meet-ups. Some operatives pursue sanctioned missions as others go rogue. Multiple cats chase multiple mice, and it is not always clear who is which.

The most pitched battles, however, happen within the hearts and minds of the individual players. Even as the new spy shows reflect a fraught, tangled and mercenary post-Cold War world, the existential threats and conflicts are more interior, intimate and, in many ways, timeless.

"It's the agency," a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) honcho (Jeffrey Wright) tells a field agent (Michael Fassbender) in The Agency. "Nothing is personal." Nothing, that is, except everything.

Based on the French series The Bureau (2015 to 2020), The Agency is as much about divided souls as it is about a divided world. The most divided is an undercover agent known as Martian (Fassbender), who is called back to the CIA London station from Addis Ababa, where he appears to have fallen in love with Sami (Jodie Turner-Smith).